East Longmeadow red stone quarries subject of Garden Club tour

Photo by Staasi HeropoulosReminders of East Longmeadow's industrial past, chunks of extracted red stone lie near Pine Quarry, where they were left in the 19th century.

EAST LONGMEADOW - The land off Old Farm Road is returning to its natural state. After decades of harvesting red stone - a reddish brown sandstone used to build the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., along with brownstone tenements in Boston and New York - quarrymen stopped blasting and digging here and left the area alone.

Trees have grown back, princess pine has sprung up, and there are hoof prints so big that while they’re probably from a large deer, a moose could have made them.

There are only hints of East Longmeadow’s industrial past, huge chunks of red stone left along a path to the quarry because the pieces weren’t quite right.

Beginning in the 19th century and continuing into the 1950s, East Longmeadow was home to dozens of quarries that produced some of the finest rock in the world.

Photo by Staasi HeropoulosGeorge Kingston

“It was all taken out of here by horses and oxen to the railroad station in the middle of town where they would have loaded it on trains,” says George C. Kingston, chairman of the town’s Conservation Commission.

Kingston will lead a guided tour through the woods and down a path to the old quarry on Oct. 14, an event sponsored by the East Longmeadow Garden Club.

“The quarries in East Longmeadow were the reason the town was created,” said Kingston. “The quarrymen were largely Italian who came from Italy to work here, which is one of the reasons we have a large Italian population in town,” he said.

Kingston says the lower Connecticut River Valley is built on a solid foundation of rock that underlies this “rift valley.” The rift is a crack in the earth that’s spread out between mountains to the west and east, he explained.

“Over time it filled with sand - sediment mostly - washing out of the glaciers, and this got compressed and became sand stone,” he said. “This was a place that had particularly good strong stone that was easier to harvest than a lot of other places.”

Red stone was immensely popular until the 1950s, when builders turned to concrete, which was easier and cheaper to manufacture because it didn’t have to be blasted from the earth. And, although the last of the quarries here closed more than a half century ago, Kingston says there is still the occasional call to reopen a few.

“There have been requests over the years to reopen some of the quarries so people can get stone that matches buildings they want to repair or restore,” he said.

But those requests have and will continue to be denied, says Kingston.

“When you quarry you end up blasting and making a lot of noise with big trucks coming in, which is not the best thing for the people who live next door,” he said.

The plants and animals have successfully reclaimed this area which is now rich with wildlife like deer, turkey, fisher, small mammals, and maybe even a moose. Kingston calls the 800-acre wooded area “botanically interesting.”

“There was at one time a population of endangered species that we have been unable to locate after looking for it quite a bit,” he said.

Kingston won’t reveal what that species is, other than to say it’s a native orchid which the garden club wants to protect by not disclosing what it is that could be hiding here.